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Coffee in 18th-century art
Coffee spread rapidly to London, Amsterdam, and Paris.This exotic hot drink, to which aphrodisiac and therapeutic virtues were attributed, soon won over the courts and the highest levels of society.
A cup brimming with coffee appears in the extraordinary still life by Francisco de Zurbaran, Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose (1633, Los Angeles, Norton Simon Foundation). Arranged in an rigorous line, the individual items emerge from the dark background, delineated with photographic precision by the light that brings out their shapes and volumes, freezing them in space, seeming almost to allow us to detect their different flavors and perfumes.By then in common use, coffee became an increasingly common subject for paintings and drawings, especially from the 17th and 18th centuries.
In his shrewd and scathing depictions of society, the 18th-century artist and Englishman William Hogarth of course included coffee. In the early 1700s, he produced a series of paintings dedicated to Marriage à-la-mode:as in his previous Carriers, the series was a comic history, divided into episodes that narrate the course of the two protagonists' destinies. The scene called "The Toilette" (1745, London National Gallery) is crowded with figures and is rich in every sort of detail. With his usual sarcasm, Hogarth depicts the protagonist as she awakes, receiving guests while sitting at her toilette table. Some of the visitors on one side of the painting listen to a poet and sip the coffee they are offered in elegant cups.
In the 18th-century portrait of The Martelli Family by Giovan Battista Benigni (Florence, Palazzo Martelli), the entire family is depicted in the reception room, surrounded by objects that attest to their wealth and social class during the daily coffee ritual, including a waiter bearing a tray laden with cups. As time passed, drinking coffee thus became a symbol of elegance and refinement.
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